MARY FANETT WHEELER has made important contributions to technology transfer and applied
mathematics through interactions with the academic community and industry. Born in Cuero,
Texas, she received two bachelor's degrees, in government and mathematics, from the
University of Texas at Austin and at one point considered law school. She was interested
in combining mathematics and economics, but switched her focus when she became interested
in physical and engineering applications. She earned her doctorate in mathematics from
Rice University in 1971.

Her academic positions include an M.D. Anderson Professorship at the University of
Houston (l988-l990), where she was the first woman to hold such a position. Since 1988, she
has held the position of Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (formerly
Mathematical Sciences) at Rice University (she was the first woman to hold such a position
at Rice). She has presented numerous lectures in Europe, Latin America, and the former
Soviet Union. Sixteen doctoral students have completed degrees under her guidance. In
1993, she presented an AMS-MAA Joint Invited Address at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in
San Antonio.

Active in a number of professional organizations, Wheeler served on the Committees on
Science Policy for the American Mathematical Society and for the Society for Industrial
and Applied Mathematics, and is a Trustee of the Society for Industrial and Applied
Mathematics. She was chair of the Advisory Committee for the Mathematical Sciences of the
National Science Foundation and served on review committees for Argonne and Oak Ridge
National Laboratories, in addition to numerous review committees for the Department of
Energy and the NSF. The author of over hundred technical papers and editor of five books,
she has been editor of the SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis, Numerical Methods in
Partial Differential Equations, Insitu, and Numerical Methods. In addition, she
is chair of the SIAM Activity Group in Geoscience, which has over five hundred members.

Wheeler's area of research is applied mathematics, or, more specifically, numerical
solutions of partial differential equations, parallel computation, and modeling flow in
porous media. Her Noether Lecture focused on the latter topic, which illustrates the way
computational science establishes a link between theory and experiment. Wheeler's work in
this area has been used to develop better models for oil recovery and for the remediation
of pollutants in ground water.

Wheeler's husband is an engineer working at Exxon Production Research; her daughter
will be finishing medical school in June 1994. Wheeler says she wasn't really serious
about mathematics until she proved her first result. "Because of that, I try to get
my own graduate students into research very early," she notes. Her graduate student
days were somewhat complicated by the fact that she was married and had a small child at
the time. "It was not the accepted thing for a woman to be going back to school when
she had a small child," she recalls. But she feels that the nature of mathematical
research eased the burden."I proved some of my best results in front of the
television when my daughter was watching," she says. Wheeler works with scientists
from a range of disciplines and particularly enjoys the challenges that engineering
problems present. She points to such areas as global change, toxic waste disposal, and
AIDS as ones in which mathematicians can make a difference. "There are enormous
problems facing our country, and to have an impact on them is exciting. That's what turns
me on."